Re: [RFC PATCH v2 0/7] of: Introduce hardware prober driver

[Rob Herring]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 2:45 PM Doug Anderson <dianders@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 2:28 PM Rob Herring <robh+dt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > So if we're searching the whole device tree for "failed-needs-probe"
> > > then we need to figure out which devices are related to each other. If
> > > a given board has second sources for MIPI panels, touchscreens, and
> > > trackpads then we need to know which of the "failed-needs-probe"
> > > devices are trackpads, which are touchscreens, and which are MIPI
> > > panels. Do you have any suggestions for how we should do that? Maybe
> > > it was in some other thread that I missed? I guess we could have a
> > > board-specific table mapping (compatible + node name + reg) to a
> > > class, but that feels awkward.
> >
> > Node name is supposed to correspond to device class, so why not use
> > that (no path or unit-address.) and nothing else (well, besides
> > "status")?
>
> One problem is that I could imagine having two second source trackpads
> that both have the same i2c address. That would give them the same
> name, right? I guess you could maybe come up with some sort of suffix
> rule? Like
>
> trackpad-1@10 {
>   compatible = "elan,blah";
>   ret = <0x10>;
>   status = "failed-needs-probe";
>   ...
> }
> trackpad-2@10 {
>   compatible = "goodix,gt7375p";
>   ret = <0x10>;
>   status = "failed-needs-probe";
>   ...
> }
>
> Then I guess the class would be "trackpad"?

That issue is somewhat orthogonal because it is not following the spec.

I'm not sure mixing the 2 styles of node names is a good idea. While
not used too much, matching by node name does ignore the unit-address,
but I'm not sure we could ignore a '-N'.

I think our options are either add something to the unit-address or
use i2c-mux binding. Adding to the unit-address is not unprecedented.
I did that for some of the register bit level bindings where you have
a node for different bits at the same address. The downside is
unit-address is bus specific, so we'd have to add that for multiple
buses. For the i2c-mux, it's perhaps a bit complex and I'm not sure
what if anything you'd have to do to manage the mux that's not really
there.

Rob